Expert: LizaL - 2/11/2005

Question
Hello
On my website www.flandersfietsen.be you'll see a lot of pictures of bicycles. No background was removed.
How can i best remove the background because there are lot of spokes in the wheels, cables , ...
Thanks in advance
Guy


Answer
Hi again Guy,

Nice looking bikes! But not an easy task, to remove the backgrounds from the photos.

There are several ways to do this, but bear in mind, they all require a bit of work. These are great photos, but they have a lot of intricate detail.


One way would be by using the Extract filter.

-- Go to the Filter pulldown menu and select Extract... You'll see your image within a new preview window, and you'll see a toolbox on the left side of the screen. Select the top tool, which looks like a marker.

Draw all around the edges of the image -- in other words, draw a border all around what you want to keep. You can change your brush size, too, if you have to get into some tight spots -- you can also zoom in and out with the magnifying glass.

Make sure you close the area you're drawing so there's not a gap. Then choose the next tool down in the palette, which is a bucket -- or fill -- tool. Click within the border you just drew, and you'll see it fill (the default color is blue). Hit the OK button, and what you drew the border around will appear in a regular Photoshop window.

You'll still have some cleanup to do, but this will get you started.

Here's a little Extract movie, using one of your photos as the example. In order to keep my movie file size down, I only did the seat, but hopefully you can see what I was doing:

http://little-works.com/all_experts/extract.mov


-- Another way to make selections from intricate images is the Magnetic Lasso tool. You'll still have some cleanup to do afterwards, and  you might even have to draw in and/or use the Pen tool to recreate some of the paths that might be inadvertently misshapen, or deleted in the process, but it does help you make the initial selections.

This tool will "snap" towards the edges of your image as you guide your pointer around it. You can click once to "set" an initial pixel, then simply move your mouse around the edge of the area, or you can click all the way around to set individual points. Clicking all the way around will let you get into the tighter, more intricate places.

In this little movie, I double-clicked on the bike image to unlock it and make it an editable layer, then I created a second, transparent layer and put it underneath the bike image.

Then I used the Magnetic Lasso to select a couple areas of the picture, to show you how it's done. I also made more than one active selection at a time. To do this, I selected the background from one area, then held down the Shift key while I selected another. Of course, if you want, you could select an area, delete it, and then move on to the next area; either way will work.

http://little-works.com/all_experts/mag_lasso.mov



-- Quick Mask: It's a lot like the Extract... filter, but more precise.

Right below your big color swatches in the Photoshop tool box are two buttons. Enter quick mask mode by clicking on the right-most button of the two. Double click on this button, and make sure Masked areas is ticked.

Then choose a brush and paint -- in this case, I was painting the parachutist, and not the sky. In other words, I was painting everything I wanted to keep, and those are the areas that appear in red. While in Quick Mask mode, you can also choose brush sizes and types according to the areas you're painting in; for some of the more intricate areas you may want to do this.

What you're actually doing is masking the areas you *don't* want to delete. So when you're finished, click on the exit quick mask mode button, which is right beside the one you clicked on to enter quick mask.

You should see what you painted show up as a selection. All you have to do now is delete that selection by selecting Cut from the Edit pulldown menu.

But again, you'll probably have to go in and do some extra touch-up work to get the stubborn areas out of the picture.

http://little-works.com/all_experts/quick_mask.mov


Really, no matter how you look at it, you've got your work cut out for you! These are great pictures, but they have some intricate detailing and will require quite a bit of work to remove the backgrounds.

Good luck, and please let me know if I can be of any more help!

Lisa